Thoughts Papers: Things To Do (à), and Not To Do (o)
· Avoid the universalizing drive.
o Modern Western society, We, Human beings (since the dawn of time), Mankind, People, Today,The reader, One, Society, All (scientists, theorists, critics, children, anything else)
à A Freudian psychoanalytic critic …
à Professor Harold Bloom argues, …
à Nineteenth-century society, as Taylor envisions it, …
· Don’t begin. Dive in.
o Once upon a time blah blah blah…
o Reality is a complicated thing. What, after all, is reality?
o Philip Meadows Taylor was born in 1808.
à In the third chapter of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, …
à “My Last Duchess” is a poem about a murder(er).
à Philip Meadows Taylors’ Confessions of a Thug opens with a claim to authenticity that is
immediately undermined.
· No, it is not clear.
o It is obvious, then, that …
o Clearly, …
o It is easy to see that …
à Nelly Dean, Lockwood’s interlocutor, is a more sophisticated rhetorician than her servant statussuggests.
à Frà Pandolf is not the only artist in the poem; the Duke too, in narrating the Duchess, paints forthe listener his own picture of her—a kind of spoken fresco that overlays the painted one.
· I believe.
o I believe … In my opinion … It is my feeling that …
o It seems to me …
o One reading might be …
o It is possible that …
à The language of this passage, rich as it is in passive verbs, suggests a more pervasive passivity inthis scene, and a corresponding lack of sexual agency.
à The young Heathcliff, in narrating the scene to Nelly Dean, presents it as more violent, more
Dantean, than it could possibly be. His diction in this scene suggests that Heathcliff’s damaged
consciousness contaminates his sensory experience of the world.
· Don’t just look at the car. Drive it.
o Quote passage, then say nothing about passage.
à Quote passage, then spend time analyzing the language of the passage, drawing from it literary
evidence to support your argument, letting it show where and how the thing you’re talking about
happens.
· Don’t oversimplify. Complicate.
o In conclusion, (everything you just said, again, so lame, so very lame)
à In conclusion, let us turn to a moment in the novel that seems to work contrary to the economy
of male desire outlined here.
à This account of the female gaze as a vivifying agent does not, however, reduce the extent to
which male characters in the poem view it as dangerous and unknowable.
à But let us not forget Lockwood. My argument that Nelly Dean is the true heroine and central
moral force within this text must complicate our understanding of Lockwood’s function within it.
[The above was adapted from Professor Matthew Kaiser’s Notes, Harvard University.]